At Speed: My Life in the Fast Lane (7 page)

Only now, three years later, can I hazard an educated guess at what was going though Bob’s mind on the bus that day. I recently discovered that, for weeks before the Tour, one of my teammates, the Australian Michael Rogers, had been dropping none-too-subtle hints to the effect that he could possibly mount a strong challenge on general classification if only the team would give him more support. Rogers had been enjoying his best season in years, having won the Ruta del Sol and the Tour of California, and the view that my recent antics made backing me a gamble and Mick the safe option had apparently gained traction with some members of the management. In hindsight, I should have put two and two together at the Tour of Switzerland in June. There, on the day of my crash, Mick had pulled out, purportedly to prepare for the Tour, when another of our teammates, Tony Martin, was leading the race. Tony went on to miss out on overall victory by 27 seconds. In Tony’s shoes, I would have been more than a little miffed that Mick hadn’t stayed in the race to help.

While Rolf Aldag and Brian Holm had immediately dismissed the notion of Mick being our coleader at the Tour, sitting on that bus in Reims, I can well imagine that Bob could see the merits of the idea, in retrospect, after five stages and not a sniff of winner’s bouquet.

I had felt under pressure ever since arriving in Rotterdam on the Wednesday before the Grand Départ. The previous few weeks and months had forced me to think hard about how many of my problems had been self-inflicted, especially the ones created or exacerbated by stories in the media. Just the week before the Tour, I’d done a press event at Bar Italia in Soho that reminded me, yet again, of the drawbacks of what I’d previously hoped and thought was just my “refreshingly” blunt and spontaneous approach in interviews. There was no particular question or answer that set me off, no especially damning headline the next day, but I had been my usual, spiky self. At HTC-Columbia I didn’t feel that anyone was really giving me good advice on how to behave with the media, and most of the time I was going on instinct. I did, though, leave for Rotterdam that week having taken a vow with myself to steer clear of all controversy over the next three weeks. It was simply costing me too much energy.

My performance in the pre-race press conference in Rotterdam, then, was uncharacteristically monosyllabic and, the journalists probably thought, disappointingly bland. Physically, I was feeling pretty good; although the cuts from my crash in Switzerland hadn’t fully healed and were still causing me some discomfort on the bike, I’d spent a few days on the track in Manchester and done some good sessions there with Rod. Since Sky had launched at the start of the year with Rod as race coach, he and I had had to change our arrangement slightly.

Given the obvious conflict of interests, I could no longer phone Rod and sound off about teammates or other riders, as I’d always done. He was, though, still the guy who could read me best as a rider, and he was also in charge of the British national team for the worlds in Melbourne later in the year. Before the National Road Race
Championships the weekend before the Tour, we’d had a short get-together for the guys likely to make the team, and we’d discussed how we could accumulate more rankings points, thereby entitling us to a bigger quota of riders in the worlds. The race itself was an absolute bloodbath, on a course like an Alpine Tour stage, with 4,500 meters of vertical climbing in Lancashire, and only 11 riders finishing on the same lap as the winner, Geraint Thomas. I didn’t even finish.

With Geraint’s team, Team Sky, making its Tour debut and aiming to win the race with Bradley Wiggins, all British eyes were on them on the day of the prologue. Meanwhile, I cruised to 126th place and was just glad to be up and running. If cycling was my comfort blanket when things were going wrong, my team was another insulating layer and the reason why being at races was a relief more than a hardship. Here at the Tour, the team line-up was pretty much the one I would have picked if I’d selected it myself. As one of the team leaders, I did have some input and had fought hard for the Australian Adam Hansen to be on the team. Adam was a bit of a rare bird in professional cycling—a quiet yet also quietly eccentric Queenslander with a sideline in computer programming. He’d been fantastic for me on my first Tour but hadn’t been picked in 2009, and Rolf and Brian were hesitating again. Adam was one of those riders who didn’t particularly enjoy the rough and tumble of riding in a peloton, and his edginess made him susceptible to crashes.

“You watch, if we pick Adam, he’ll crash in the first week and we’ll be doing the rest of the Tour with eight riders,” Rolf kept telling me.

I, though, kept insisting, saying that Adam would prove them wrong, that he’d be on the front for three weeks, that he’d be amazing. Eventually, they’d caved. Adam was in, with Bert Grabsch, Tony
Martin, Bernie Eisel, Maxime Monfort, Kanstantsin Sivtsov, Michael Rogers, Mark Renshaw, and me.

The first stage would be our first chance, my first chance. We’d been going about an hour when Rolf’s voice crackled in my earpiece. “Adam’s down. Adam’s crashed.” My heart sank; Adam had got up, but we could tell from the snippets of information that were coming from the team car, and then when we saw Adam, that Rolf and Brian’s fears had probably been realized. They were annoyed at him for crashing and didn’t make too much effort to hide it. When Adam drew alongside the team car and asked what he should do, Brian looked back at him blankly.

“What do you mean?”

Adam was confused, too. “Well, I can’t ride,” he said. “I think my hand’s broken, my ribs, I can’t brake—”

Brian cut him dead. “Brake? You don’t need to brake. You’re riding on the front of the bunch all day, anyway, so off you go.”

Adam did his best for the rest of the day but was packing his suitcases the following morning. We were lucky that he was the only casualty; we’d never seen crowds like that, layered three and four deep along every meter of the route and spilling into the already narrow road. One crash was caused by a dog running into the middle of the peloton. It was mayhem. I’ve always said that most half-decent amateurs would be struggling or crashing even in the neutralized zone on first stages of Tours de France, such is the speed and tension, but this was something else.

One of my strengths, luckily, is my ability to focus on the task at hand, especially in the last 50 km. In the winter we’d lost George Hincapie, probably the best pathfinder in the pro peloton, but on Mark Renshaw’s wheel I could still lock into autopilot.

With 8 km to go, the obligatory first-day breakaway was caught, the lead-out trains were starting to rev, and I sat in Mark’s slipstream like a stone in a catapult. In four years of riding the Tour de France, nothing much had changed in my routine: the half hour, hour I spent doing my homework—memorizing the next day’s finish every night, visualizing it, studying it in the roadbook or sometimes on Google Earth—was sacrosanct, as it was at every race. Today’s map had looked relatively straightforward, but I’d made a couple of mental bullet points: a tight, right-angle right-hander with 4 km to go; a wide but very acute right-hander at 2.1 km, almost a U-turn, that looked nothing like the drawing in the roadbook.

The first one, we’d swooped and positively glided around. As we came out of the bend and onto a wide, straight road, though, the Lampre train surged and we were swamped. Garmin then went and I was 10, 15 wheels back as we approached the second right-hander, until Mick Rogers surged and brought Tony Martin onto the front just as the road started to curve. I said that all I needed to do in the last 50 km was stay on Renshaw’s wheel; now, as we came into the corner, I took that a bit too literally and looked down to see his quick-release wheel skewer tangled in my spokes. It was only a second or two, but the timing and place couldn’t have been worse. All I could do to stay upright was lean on the rider to the left of me, Mirco Lorenzetto of the Lampre team, while carrying straight on toward the barriers, where we both came down anyway. A handful of other riders taking a line between us and the apex of the bend, including the three-time world champion Oscar Freire, were collateral damage, also hitting the deck.

If nothing else, everything that had happened in the first six months of the year had taught me to roll with the punches. I don’t
know, maybe with my confidence as shaky as it was it was also somehow, perhaps subconsciously, a relief not to have to sprint. As the TV motorbike rode alongside me and the cameraman zoomed in to film my reaction, I lifted a hand off my bars, shrugged, and smiled. It was harder to stay cool a few minutes later, when I rode over the finish line, around a corner, and into the small crowd of fans and journalists gathered outside our team bus. Above the shouts of “
Allez Cavendishe
” and “Hard luck, Mark,” two or three English voices were louder and more noticeable than the rest.

“Cavendish, you suck! Go home!”

Standing on either side of me, Kristy and our sprint coach, Erik Zabel, probably feared what was coming next. This, though, was the new, improved, ultraphlegmatic, ultradiplomatic Mark Cavendish. This Mark Cavendish turned, smiled at his new “fans,” and told them to have a nice day.

The next morning, my self-restraint would be tested again by
L’Équipe’s
coverage of the crash. The paper that two years earlier had anointed me “The Mozart of the Eleven-Tooth Sprocket” (it sounds more poetic in French) had now decided that a more appropriate nickname would be
“Catastrophe
Cavendish” or
“Le Pyromane”
(“The Pyromaniac”). My performance in the first stage of the Tour, in their eyes, was worth exactly 0 out of 10. The French Minister of Sports had even weighed in, calling me “the bad boy of cycling.”

This all grated, just as it always bothered me to be portrayed as a “dangerous” sprinter. Throughout my career, while always admitting that I was fearless, I’d also prided myself on never, ever being reckless. The risks I took were few and far between and were invariably calculated, endangering only myself. In that 2010 season I’d crashed three times, but because of who I was, the stage I was performing
on, and the schadenfreude that was clearly such a popular disease, everything had been magnified and exaggerated. Again, for me, it was all part of the learning curve—finding out that the trappings of success included scrutiny and criticism and realizing that I needed to adapt. Accepting that, though, and assimilating it was going to be a long process, especially for someone as headstrong as me.

Only once previously, at the 2009 Tour, had I won the first bunch sprint of a major tour, so I knew how to bide my time. Here, though, I was going to have to be especially patient: stage 2 through the Belgian Ardennes was never likely to favor a sprint and turned out to be even more selective than we’d envisaged due to heavy rain. If that stage had been billed as a miniature Liège–Bastogne–Liège, on some of the same roads, the next one would be a passable imitation of Paris–Roubaix, the grueling annual one-day classic featuring long stretches on cobbled farm tracks in northern France. I’d always dreamt of racing Paris–Roubaix as a kid, and now I fancied my chances of a good performance even if a win seemed unlikely. I was actually in a good position and starting to get quite excited until my handlebars and saddle came loose as we hit the cobbles; it was suddenly clear that my bike—Scott’s new aerodynamic Foil frame—was too stiff over the stones. The Foil was a fantastic bike, but the less aerodynamic Addict, which I’d used all year up to that point, would no doubt have suited the terrain better. I was not a happy boy.

With my wonky handlebars and sinking saddle, I was way out the exhaust. Renshaw performed absolute miracles to take me back into the bunch and through it like Lionel Messi on a mazy dribble, but then—BOOM—bodies and bikes clattered together again.

Frank Schleck, one of the pre-race favorites, was down with a broken collarbone. I managed to stay upright and bunny-hop over another
rider spread-eagled on the cobbles, but by then everyone who had been in front of the crash was barreling away in a cloud of dust. After the race, a few people said to me that they thought 25th was a good result. I, though, was sure that I could and should have made the top 10 and possibly won.

I took heart from the fact that the sprints were finally on their way—three nailed-on bunch gallops as the race wound its way down the east of France and toward the Alps. That night, after my roommate, Mark Renshaw, had dropped off, I lay with my eyes wide open for a few minutes, imagining those final 200 meters in Reims—like a bomb detonating down my thighs and through my calves, every cell ablaze with lactic acid and adrenalin, and then the explosion of joy on the line. I’d experienced it four times in the Tour in 2008 and six times in 2009. Nothing else in cycling quite compared.

I definitely woke the next morning, I definitely got on my bike and rode from Reims, and I definitely saw Alessandro Petacchi win the fourth stage of the Tour de France. The rest—the race itself, those final kilometers that I’d memorized, the lead-out and then those four, five pedal strokes before I sat up—are all still there, but somehow the picture is foggy and drained of color and noise. It was as though, when I’d finally nodded off the previous night, the lights had stayed off until the next afternoon. It was as though the noise that had woken me wasn’t my alarm but
Clunk, clunk, clunk
.

t
here is one thing worse than losing a Tour de France sprint that you expected to win: losing one and then having to spend the night in a Hotel Campanile. Over the course of a Tour, the race organizer, ASO, tries to give each team an even spread of five-star luxury and
two-star slumming, and Campaniles have become infamous among Tour riders for occupying a position very much at the more modest end of the scale. Right then, though, not even room service in the penthouse at the Mandarin Oriental could have raised my spirits. I was distraught and still at a loss as to how it had happened; never before had my legs abandoned me like they had on that finishing straight in Reims.

Luckily, I had Brian and Aldis.